Suominen Oyj

Good day, everybody, and welcome to Suominen's Q1 2024 result publication. My name is Emilia Peltala, and I'm heading Suominen's Communications and Investor Relations. Today, our president and CEO, Tommi Björman, and CFO, Janne Silonsaari, will present the result, and after the presentation, there is time for questions and answers as every time.

but please tommy floor is yours okay thank you Emilia good morning everybody and thank you also my behalf for the q1 result investor call and our agenda today is the same as we used before so we will look at first the first quarter in brief then Janne will go through the financial review I will take it over and review a little bit that what is the progress linked to the strategy and then a few words about the outlook for 2024 and in the end Emilia will run the questions and answers section so if we look at the first quarter 2024 in brief so what we can look at here so that net sales the top line actually was slightly lower than previous quarter last year and it was mainly driven by the raw material price which actually lowered the total sales price but at the same time we were able to improve the sales volume and able to improve slightly our sales margins Then in order to look at how it delivered to the EBITDA, so the EBITDA was 1.9 million better than the corresponding period last year. Of course, in order to look at the level of 4.5, we can't be totally happy about the progress what we have, especially linked to the improvement actions what we have designed. So it took a little bit longer. and a little bit lower, meaning that the improvement actions what we have in the place. So that our expectation was a little bit better, but we can consider that in order to get the 1.9 million improvement compared to previous period was actually good achievement, but maybe the expectations also internally was slightly higher, but we gradually continue to improve our quarterly results. and then in order to look at the cash flow on that was slightly negative compared to the last year as well but it was mainly driven by the networking capital which was linked to the to the situations on the market side but it's for us operationally it was well managed although it was slightly negative but now I would hand it over to Janne in that he would review more the financial part of our results Janne please

Okay, thank you, Tommi, and good morning on my behalf as well. So let's start with the net sales. So sales volume increased from comparison period as stated, and sales prices decreased following lower raw material prices. And as a reminder, price indexes slash mechanisms are quite common in our industry, so the raw material changes are driving the general price levels. We had a small negative impact from the currencies, and on positive note, we continued good trend on new product sales, where share of the total sales continued above 35%. And we consider new products such that are launched in the past three years. On EBITDA, we saw clear improvement compared to the comparison period. Main drivers for the improvement were higher sales volumes and better sales margins. We saw nice development, especially in EMEA, regardless of strike at Finnish sports. And strike impact on EBITDA, we estimate, was less than half a million euro. So as Tommy mentioned earlier, regardless of clear improvement versus comparison period, our expectation was higher related to ongoing improvement actions contribution in Q1. And here is a snapshot on the consolidated P&L and no major items to be commented at this stage, so we can move on to the cash flow from operations. And here we saw a small negative turn mainly related to the change in networking capital part of it was related to the strike in Finland impact on our inventory and part on accounts receivable which is mainly related to the customer mix and this is area where we expect to be to be corrected and improved during the year so that's shortly and briefly on on the financial so progressing strategy Thank you, Jange, on that.